


Light, gas, water, electricity, rent

by worldaccordingtofangirls



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley and astronomy..., Getting Together, Kissing, M/M, Magical Realism, Moving In Together, the what are we conversation with added shit about god and the universe bc i have to be that way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 13:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20136532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldaccordingtofangirls/pseuds/worldaccordingtofangirls
Summary: On Sunday, they flood the house.





	Light, gas, water, electricity, rent

**Author's Note:**

> back at it!
> 
> title from “Sunday Candy” by Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment. 
> 
> a lot of inspiration from “La luz es como el agua” (Light is Like Water) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 
> 
> thank you so much for reading! :)

On Sunday, they flood the house. It’s not—it’s not for any reason. It’s just what you do. Like a housewarming. House-flooding. They bought the property. The whole thing. Aziraphale still has his bookshop on the first floor. The only difference is now they own the whole building. So the plants can have the sunny third floor. It is worth noting that, when Aziraphale proposes this, his entire mouth dimples (somehow), and he raises his eyebrows just so, nudging the words past glasses of after-dinner port, the lights of the Ritz sparkling in the glass, and in the liquid, and in the smooth silver bowls of their spoons, and this is disastrous—"My dear boy, imagine having the space for a greenhouse!”—as if Crowley hasn’t _imagined _more than enough for the both of them—then there’s the matter of his darlings, spoiled, rotten—Crowley will have to holler his voice hoarse for years to make up for it.

They can afford the building. Just the other day, a paternal grandfather cropped up in A.Z. Fell’s family tree with five million pounds to his name. Miracle, that. They sign a deed four days after the First Day of the Rest of Their Lives. They sign a deed, and they haven’t said a word to each other about—about—about—for Christ’s sake. (On Christ, at least, they can agree.) It doesn’t need saying here, any reader with half a brain doesn’t need it spelled out for her. But it does need saying between the two of them_, _doesn’t it? Before they sign a deed! And yet they sign it, Crowley gulpingly jotting down his signature, the fake one, the human one. He feels his God-given name, its serpentine flare, burning in his chest as his hand moves across the page. They’re one and the same at this point, really. His human self and all his other selves, melding, blurring together—Christ, he is sweating and he doesn’t dare look at Aziraphale. They sign the deed. Two days later, they shut all the doors and windows and turn on the taps. 

“The utilities bill is going to be astronomical,” murmurs Crowley as the water begins to lap against his ankles.

“Mm,” says Aziraphale, dipping his chin towards his tea. He has done his hair carefully, white ringlets coiling first over the dark skin of his forehead, then cresting away in a pretty, silvery gulf of curls. Crowley wonders what it will look like, drifting in the water. He wants to touch it, then his cheek, his chin, the soft flesh beneath, but they haven’t done anything like that yet and, after everything, he has to admit he doesn’t think it’s so wrong for him to be afraid to be the first. 

They signed the deed. They signed the deed. Crowley’s not stupid, he knows what it means. They have things, too, things they bought together, Crowley leaning over Aziraphale’s shoulder in the Home and Garden section of Marks and Spencer’s, smelling his cologne. He let him pick whatever he wanted, who was he to say no. (Didn’t want to, not even once.) They got rugs and watering cans, kitchen supplies, a can opener and a cheese grater and a set of cast iron pans, pre-seasoned, though Crowley knows they will likely never use them, because Aziraphale loves to eat but can’t cook, has no interest in learning, and the only reason Crowley eats is Aziraphale. He knows both of them just want to see the pans hanging in the kitchen. They’re homey. Home! Christ. _Christ._ From his apartment, Crowley moves his favorite bottles of wine and the patch of hostas he loves so much, his endless black wool mock necks, and his set of black binders, the ones he most loves to wear. He didn’t like the curtains in the back room—thick canvas in a terrible, not-quite-beige that came with the place—so he asked if they could change them, and Aziraphale said alright, on one condition. Tartan isn’t stylish, but it’ll do. 

The water reaches their knees, soaking the fabric of Crowley’s cigarette-leg jeans.

When Armageddon was coming, everything had been full of fire, like they said it would be. That made sense to Crowley. He doesn’t usually like things to be predictable, but every once in a while, he’ll get attached to a certain pattern, will want one specific thing to always lead to another. Precarity, uncertainty, the millennia-long limbo he had hung in, the space between Her right and wrong, wondering where he fell, if there even was a place to fall, if from the beginning he had actually been suspended, strung up by the tender, velvet-fuzzed black knuckles of his wings, and the universe was still waiting on his choice—the fire, even as it swallowed his Bentley, made sense to him. 

Here, between him and Aziraphale, the water level rises slowly. 

Aziraphale reads; Crowley lies on the sofa, gazing up. Head pillowed on his hands. It feels like the room takes an age to fill up, but it happens very suddenly that they are floating. Everything else is still—the furniture and the shelves, the books, Aziraphale’s spectacles, all hang in blue suspension. When the water level reaches their chins, his tea blossoms out from his cup, a soft brown bloom. As the water keeps rising, it pushes like a cushion beneath Crowley’s back, then swallows him, so he floats with his feet pointed towards the ceiling and his head, still pillowed in his hands, pointed towards the floor. The water is everywhere. It rises, rises and rises, hushing past them, filling up to the ceiling. Everywhere, it teems with light.

“Aziraphale,” says Crowley, the word releasing from his mouth in a silver bubble. He can’t believe he’s spoken. “Look up.”

Water is—cleansing, right? This doesn’t feel cleansing. It feels concentrating, like everything is more alive than it was before, filtered through the prism, casting a more vibrant version of itself onto infinite liquid walls. For a minute, Crowley thinks Aziraphale didn’t hear him. Then he shuts his book, lets his teacup go—empty, or full of the water, it sails, drifting through the room. He tilts his chin. Crowley looks away, but out of the corner of his eye he still looks. (What else is new.) He sees Aziraphale smile. Everywhere, light. The water is not pierced by it, not shot through with it, because that would imply that they are separate things when in fact they are part and parcel, lush, biotic systems of each other.

Here are thousands and thousands and thousands of kinds of light, all in the same place. There is streetlight, from all the nights since electricity was invented, sparkling through like day, like fresh stars—orange and yellow, wan, artificial light. This is not the kind of light that is supposed to be what stars are made of, but along with Crowley’s not-quite uniform distaste for predictability comes a complete disdain for supposed-tos. He loves it. There is neon, the glow of gas station signs and the flickering, fly-flecked lights outside of clubs, and there are the lamps of diners, aluminum off-road places with tabletops ridged with grease, like the ones in America where Aziraphale will order something with a name like bananas foster or Mississippi mudslide and Crowley will sip a cup of black coffee that tastes, admittedly, like nothing you can get in Britain. (Oddly, perhaps, Aziraphale is the one who loves America best—he fits, with his lace and linens, in the South and the West, the high, dry red mountains and the sweet curve of a Georgia peach. Crowley likes Dunkin’ Donuts and New York City, the misty between night spaces at toll booths on the Jersey turnpike, and little else.) There are flickering candles, too, and oil lamps, and the low, dirty gleam that coated everything in the Middle Ages; there is the high glare of the sun over the desert, and the grey specter of a day when they are expecting rain. There are electricity-saving lightbulbs like the ones Anathema loves, curled like corkscrews, and fluorescents like the overhead lights in schools where the Them kick each other’s shins under the desks and gaze relentlessly out the windows. (Crowley knows the feeling, admires it; this is why he loves children best.)

There is the fragrant, multicolored lean of sunlight through stained glass, and it passes smoothly over Crowley’s face. He sighs. The countless pinpoints of light are as many potential constellations, and his brain whirs with delight: here they have in front of them a blank night sky, and all the raw stuff of the universe. Outrageous to think of it—a second chance—but here it is. He loves invention. Nebulae. It begins, as it will end, with—

Crowley leans back and smiles, pointing at a beam of blue in the right corner of the sky. It was once inside the lamppost on a backroad near Tadfield, traced and retraced. He says, “Alpha Centauri.”

Aziraphale, of course, has always liked things as they are, and as they have been. Not how they could be. It is in his nature, Crowley thinks, more than anything. Perhaps Crowley has rationalized it, to protect his own feelings, but he does think it is in Aziraphale’s nature to love things that have already been made. Things that he can understand, trust, rely on. This knowledge rises sometimes as bitterness in the back of Crowley’s throat. Of all the things to rely on, Heaven? Heaven, and not Crowley, who would do anything, who for centuries would have done anything. Invention can go hand-in-hand with devotion, can express it. Devotion... What better way to express adoration for something than to imagine all its possibilities, spread before their eyes as bright points, the lines between them to be sketched in brave, blazing trails, dripping light? But Aziraphale’s nostalgia is a part of him, and Crowley finds himself helpless not to feel rage and not to feel love. Tartan is _not stylish, _but it will—it _will_ do, it can do, he knows it can, feels beneath it all love as an exploding infinity of tolerance in his gut, it will do, if only… If only…

It is silly, to think of starts and ends; time is continuous, each moment flows into the next, liquid. It’s all the same; it starts, as it will end. Time means nothing in eternity. Oh, but who _cares._ The insistences of humanity are bewitching. Crowley has always felt things he wasn’t supposed to feel. No matter what timetables the celestial sphere may keep, he does feel it when one thing closes and a new thing opens. He feels it all the time, even when he doesn’t want to. There is new and old. Things end. Things begin. Things fail to do both and fail to do either. Some you never get back, either because they’re over, or because they never began. That’s what human beings live with every day. Comes along with being able to choose. Always a price. Always. Crowley’s throat tightens. Everything is silent; the water has reached the ceiling of the third floor, filled the entire house.

“Alpha Centauri,” says Aziraphale.

Crowley wants to say, _Never mind, _he wants to say, _Yes. _He says nothing. 

“Really, Crowley?” murmurs Aziraphale. “But that one’s already been made.”

“I know,” he croaks. “I just—like it.”

He knows Aziraphale is looking at him. He knows none of these remarks can be in passing. So many things, too many things have passed between them already; they have left behind a residue. Crowley is struck again with its importance, this whole matter of patterns, of history, _what has been_—there is too much private meaning accumulated between them, anything he says gets caught in it, significance clinging thickly to the words, like they’ve been dragged through mud. He’s been waiting all this time for them to sit down and say it all. Speech is creation. Once you give something a name, it becomes real. He’s been waiting, all this time. 

“You never went there,” says Aziraphale.

“No,” says Crowley. “Didn’t want to. Not really. Or, not—I mean to say—I…”

“Oh, _Crowley,_” says Aziraphale.

Crowley can’t look, but he hears water moving, shifting from one place to another; he can’t look. He fights the sudden urge to doggy-paddle away. (He is not a good swimmer.) Then Aziraphale is in front of him, floating gently. The water lifts his curls, buoys them around his head like—oh, alright, yes, they’re like a halo, but they’re aglow with all those thousands of different kinds of light in the water, not celestial light at all, earthly light. Human light.

“You must know,” says Aziraphale. His face is contorted with emotion. He touches his fingers to both sides of Crowley’s face at one. “It wasn’t because I didn’t want to.”

“Hnngkk,” says Crowley. Aziraphale’s face twists again—guilt, grief. Crowley wishes he wouldn’t look like that while he touches him. There should be only joy. After so much there should be only joy. He sits for a moment in the wake of that thought, stunned. There should only be joy. Such a devastatingly human impulse. It will only get him hurt. Crowley should be worried. He’s not. He feels every vessel of blood in his body, the liquid rushing through it. Aziraphale is holding his face completely now, palms pressed against his cheeks, his jaw.

“I didn’t—I—I still thought—and you—I didn’t do what I wanted back then,” he is saying. “I did what I thought was the right thing. I didn’t think they could ever be the same, that actually, deep down, they always had been. You taught me that.”

“Aziraph—” says Crowley.

“That doesn’t change the fact that it was a mistake,” murmurs Aziraphale, gazing unfalteringly into Crowley’s eyes. “I was selfish, and I hurt you. I was so precious and afraid, I wanted you to do everything for me. I didn’t even realize—of course, after all that time, you would need to hear it. I’m sorry, Crowley.”

“It’s not worth calling it a mistake in retrospect,” blurts Crowley, and he means it. “How could you even know what would have happened if—it’s—it’s—what you had to do, what we had to do—”

“Maybe,” says Aziraphale. “Or it’s what we decided. What I decided. You’ve never taken choice away from me before, Crowley. Don’t start now.”

“I don’t blame you.” 

“You do, a little.” Aziraphale’s thumb traces down his cheekbone. “It’s all right.”

“No, Aziraphale—”

“Your love is strong enough to withstand a little anger, Crowley,” murmurs Aziraphale. “I believe it.”

Crowley stares.

“You can feel it, then?”

Aziraphale shakes his head. “No. This kind of love—I don’t feel it like that, never have. I just know you.”

Crowley falls silent, staring at him. He realizes that they are holding hands, their left hands, Aziraphale still cupping his right against Crowley’s cheek. The taps have shut off, the house is full. There is the water, the light. The walls seem distant, the cluttered bookshelves, the curtains, the new, never-to-be-used pans—there is the water, and the light, and they are there in the middle of it, holding each other.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley asks, voice cracking. “Is this the universe?”

Aziraphale runs his hands down the sides of his face; his brown eyes are enormous, liquid, tender by infinities, it makes Crowley feel like something has gone out from under him, like he is going to fall over. 

“I don’t know,” says Aziraphale. “I think—maybe it could be. Do you want that?”

Crowley grips his wrists and nods.

“Crowley,” whispers Aziraphale. “Oh, Crowley, I love you entirely.”

Crowley buries his face in his neck, grips at his back. He doesn’t want him to see that he’s crying.

“In the beginning,” Aziraphale murmurs, stroking his hair, holding him tighter, so tight it hurts, the high point of Crowley’s cheekbone and his chin pressing into Aziraphale’s shoulder. “There were not names for things.”

“And after?” gasps Crowley, when he is able. He feels Aziraphale smile into his hair.

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to, my dear, it’s unbecoming,” he says. “Someone must have made them.”

Crowley speaks into his chest. Aziraphale pulls back, pushing his hair from his face, leaving his hand there, thumb at the corner of his open, yellow eyes.

“Crowley?”

“I love you,” says Crowley, and as much as he favors predictability, like Crowley to certain patterns, Aziraphale does take the occasional shine to novelty.

He kisses him.

In a few minutes, they will pull the plug. The water will drain, and things will be left behind. There will be the bookshelves, their high, wooden reach, and the desk where Aziraphale keeps his accounts, the small, burnished brass bell that customers sometimes ring to no avail. There will be the couches, the squashy beige ones, and the single, sleek beige one where Crowley kicks his feet up, wearing his sleek, black shoes, just to hear the way Aziraphale hisses between his teeth—I already _told _you, dear boy, sock feet only, you know that _full _well—yes, Aziraphale, I do know. There will be a refrigerator in the back, with six bottles of champagne and one jar of raspberry jam and nothing else, and there will be an antique telephone with a dial that swings your finger back and forth. There will be the pans, hanging in their kitchen, their smooth black undersides catching the afternoon sun. There will be the curtains, tartan. It won’t be stylish but it will be everything else. They have made something new. It will begin, just moments from now. When it does, all the books will be dry, the plants will still need to be watered, and Crowley will be here, with Aziraphale. Like they always have been. 

**Author's Note:**

> this show…got me y’all it really got me
> 
> uhhhh intersection of the mbti community and good omens fandom, wherever you are…talk to me about the ne-si axis and how it’s ALL OVER THIS WORK AND ALL OF ITS THEMES 
> 
> writing the sentence “Crowley has always felt things he wasn’t supposed to feel” drove a knife through my gay heart
> 
> as always, thank you for reading! comments and kudos are deeply appreciated. Lots and lots of love.


End file.
